chromatic,

It appears you put your finger on the problem. 6 of the 40+ subroutines are perfectly happy living in a text file, but for whatever reason when stuffed into a database and then pulled out and eval'd they don't like it very much. I suppose it is a bit degrading. :-) I should have been checking $@, and I was in other places, but oh well.

It turns out that the 6 lame subroutines also happen to be some of the larger ones, which is why it seemed like I was "filling up" eval when I was experimenting.

*sigh*

Now all I have to do is figure out how to make eval happy. I'm already stumped on the first couple problem subroutines, but now that I know what the problem is it's only a matter of time. And this kind of blows in that user code (as opposed to my system code) will have to worry about this problem as well.

Anyway brother chromatic, thank you very much for your wisdom and insight. :-)

James